An Ode to Umbraco: A roundup of our 2018 events calendar

If you know anything about Umbraco, you’ll know that its tagline is “The Friendly CMS”.

This isn’t just PR talk though. As THE open source darling, Umbraco has a community of like-minded people that regularly talk, meet up, party and even take part in hackathons.

Over the past year we have attended many of these Umbraco events and got to know a lot of great people. We’ve also done some learning along the way! With 2018 coming to a close, here’s our round of the events we managed to take part in.

Right here in, what some would argue, the greatest city in the world, our local Umbraco community meets up. Along with a few other community members, we run a monthly get together of agency workers, contractors and Umbraco first timers. The meet up have really stepped up this year and feature regular speakers on a variety of development subjects, usually with a couple of pints afterwards.

Local meet ups are a great way to meet a smaller group of the community, especially for those of us who are a little introverted. It also allows us to get a wider view of how people work with Umbraco, and share other ways of working – it’s all about collaboration.

There are Umbraco meetups all over the country, too – we’ve been lucky enough to attend others in Manchester and London throughout the year.

CodeCabin is weekend like no other. Twenty Umbraco developers from across the land, handpicked by the Umbraco megastars at UMCO, descended on a converted Barn in the Peak District to code.

Following a schedule we agreed on before the weekend, we shared round tables on a variety of subjects, developed as groups or on our own, and basically had as relaxing a time as you can while working. It wasn’t all work though. We had movie nights, quizzes, and Lucy Brailsford’s famed cooking to enjoy outside of working hours as well as a tipple or two too.

Some of the community discussions this year included front end performance and discussing just exactly what is full stack anyway? We formed project teams for all sorts of Umbraco goodness and even submitted a few pull requests (changes to code) of our own.

Run every year by the fine folks at Cogworks, the UK Fest is yet another annual Umbraco get together, this time set in the heart of London at the Barbican Centre.

For the first time, we managed to take part in the pre-festival hackathon where we were able to contribute to the open source codebase of Umbraco.

Everyone is there for the same goal so regardless of your knowledge you will find someone to help or get help from. It’s definitely worth attending, you’re guaranteed to learn a lot and make Umbraco even better!

On the final day, the crowd gathered to listen to speakers which, this year, included me! I spoke about an introduction to service workers simply called “Service workers: what and why?”

I was pretty nervous, but the Umbraco community once again stepped up and made me feel comfortable, for my first time on stage! The rest of the conference had some fantastic talks in a great setting and we came back full of ideas.

You can check out a copy of my presentation here. If you’ve got any questions, get in touch. One of the best things about the Umbraco community is how many people are about to help out, so don’t be afraid to ask if you have a question that needs answering.

Find your next meet up

This isn’t it though, there are absolutely loads of Umbraco event going on all over the world. From conferences in Germany, Sweden, Australia, America and (for the first time ever) there is an Umbraco Tibet meetup happening!

The global community and love for this CMS is really fantastic, and we’re delighted to dive in and contribute – because we’re helping the product we work with grow while making friends with others doing the same. It’s not called the Friendly CMS for nothing!